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biography
| name: |
Perkins, Frances
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popular name of Fannie Coiralie Perkins
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1882–1965)
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| biography:
| Cabinet member, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Graduating from Mount Holyoke College (1902), she taught, worked in settlement houses, and came to favour a greater role for the federal government in aiding the poor. Soon after earning a graduate degree in political science from Columbia University, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) that killed 146 factory workers, an event that further inspired her crusade for safe working conditions and other labour reforms. She won passage of landmark labour legislation as New York State industrial commissioner (1926–32), and, as US labour secretary and the first woman member of a federal cabinet (1932–45), she helped develop major New Deal reforms, including social security (1935) and a federal Fair Labour Standards Act that imposed a minimum wage (1938). She later served on the Civil Service Commission (1946–53) and taught at Cornell (from 1957). |
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